Kirk has the thing beaten. He has spent the back half of “Arena” turning a barren rock and a handful of raw minerals into a working cannon, sulphur and charcoal and a few rough diamonds packed into a length of bamboo, and now the Gorn captain is down in front of him, wounded and waiting for the killing blow. The Metrons have all but invited it. And Kirk lowers the weapon.
There is a profound gulf between a clean, mid-century sci-fi concept and the messy realities of a weekly television production schedule. Robert Bloch, the mind behind Psycho, hands over a script packed with meaty questions about identity, transhumanism, and the exact boundary where a machine begins and a human ends. It is a fantastic template. What the production does with it is more complicated.
The reputation arrives before the episode does. Search “Mudd’s Women” in any Trek forum and you’ll find the same verdict repeated until it looks like consensus: rampant sexism, a story about space hookers, early TOS at its embarrassing worst. I read enough of it that the sheer volume eventually had the opposite effect. I sat down specifically to watch it and have my say.
There’s a moment early in Star Trek: Red Shirts where the security team is loaded into torpedo casings and fired at a planet. The team inside stare out in terror, crammed into modified casings with little more than life support and a prayer, while the U.S.S. Warren follows up with two live torpedoes to knock the target antenna offline. It’s a brisk, vicious image, and it tells you exactly what kind of book you’re holding before the first casualty lands. These people are already equipment. The comic knows it, and it wants you to know it too.
There’s a version of Star Trek that exists slightly to the left of the one you know.
The phasers are called lasers. The shirt colours are wrong. Spock occasionally behaves in ways that would make the television Spock raise an eyebrow. Kirk is a straightforward space hero rather than the complicated, contradictory, occasionally reckless man William Shatner was building on screen. Yet despite all that, the stories are recognisably Trek-shaped. Strange worlds. Impossible problems. Civilisations in crisis. The Enterprise arriving somewhere unusual and trying to think its way through a situation that shouldn’t have a solution.
There’s a moment roughly halfway through “The Enemy Within” where good Kirk, gentle, compassionate, and increasingly useless, tries to give an order and physically can’t hold the sentence together. He knows what he wants to say. The words just won’t come with any weight behind them. It’s a small moment, easy to lose in an episode full of bigger ones, but it’s the most honest thing the episode does. The argument isn’t really about good and evil. It’s about what actually holds a command together, and whether the things we’d rather not own about ourselves are, inconveniently, structural.
I came to TOS backwards, the way most people my age did. TNG was the Trek I grew up with, the one that was actually on when I was old enough to care. TOS arrived later, in the way things did before streaming made chronology optional, in chunks, on whatever channel was running it that week, in an order that made no particular sense. “Where No Man Has Gone Before” was probably not the first TOS episode I watched, but it might as well have been. It’s the one that made me understand what the show actually was, as distinct from the show I already knew. The two things are related but they are not the same thing, and this episode is where you feel the difference most clearly.
The premise of “Charlie X” sounds like something you’d find stapled to a bus stop in 1966. Lonely teenager. Godlike powers. Spaceship full of people he makes uncomfortable. On paper it’s disposable, the kind of high-concept Twilight Zone material that could collapse under its own gimmick in twenty minutes. What Dorothy C. Fontana does instead, in her first Trek teleplay credit, working from a story by Gene Roddenberry, is turn it into something quietly unsettling.
There is a specific kind of irony in the fact that Star Trek, a franchise built on the idea that humanity could sort itself out and reach for something better, began its broadcast life by killing the last member of a species and then moving on to the next episode. That’s not a criticism. Or rather, it isn’t only a criticism. It’s the most interesting thing about The Man Trap, an episode that is simultaneously the wrong introduction to Star Trek and, in its final thirty seconds, one of the most honest expressions of what Star Trek was trying to be.
